Two trains are seen after they collided just outside Egypt’s Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, Friday, Aug. 11, 2017, killing at least dozens of people and injuring over 100 in the country’s deadliest... (Ravy shaker)

(Newser)
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Two passenger trains collided on Friday just outside Egypt's Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, killing 43 people, according to authorities, the country's deadliest rail accident in more than a decade. Magdy Hegazy, a top health official in Alexandria, said that along with the 43 killed, the crash also injured 122 people, the AP reports. The Egyptian Railways Authority said earlier that a train coming from Cairo, Egypt's capital, crashed into the back of a train that was waiting at a small station in the district of Khorshid, just east of Alexandria. The stationary train had just arrived from Port Said, a Mediterranean city on the northern tip of the Suez Canal, when it was hit, according to the statement. The statement did not say what caused the accident, only that the authority's experts would investigate.

AP footage from the scene showed mangled train coaches on the tracks and several others derailed as hundreds of onlookers and victims' relatives gathered around on both sides of the tracks. Ambulances were standing by and riot police and soldiers were deployed to keep the onlookers away from the scene of the disaster. Residents from nearby homes rushed to the scene to look for survivors inside crushed train carriages or offer first aid to the injured. By nightfall, cranes aided by floodlights began to remove the wreckage off the tracks to allow rail traffic to resume. Rescue teams, meanwhile, continued to look for more bodies and injured passengers inside the carriages. Egypt's railway system has a poor safety record, mostly blamed on decades of badly maintained equipment and poor management. Friday's accident was the deadliest rail accident since 2006, when at least 51 people were killed when two commuter trains collided near Cairo.

All this technology the world has...and there are still stupid preventable things like this happening.

BassScunner

Aug 11, 2017 6:53 PM CDT

R.I.P for the victims.

Gueorgui Gueorguiev

Aug 11, 2017 5:12 PM CDT

"Residents from nearby homes rushed to the scene to look for survivors inside crushed train carriages or offer first aid to the injured." For some of the people who rushed to the scene, helping the wounded was the only care in their minds! For the majority however, loot, pillage and theft was their primary concern! Some were seen charging forward with wheelbarrow's and mule carriages, and no, that weren't improvised Ambulances! They behaved just like any proper Gypsy should&would, and completely in line with what I have personally seen and experienced in Egypt every time I visit the country! Anyway, the already dead aren't in need of their possessions any longer, right!? For the victims, RIP! For the looters, see you in Hell.